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Posts Tagged ‘printmaking’

We are delighted to share a pair of proof impressions of Serie I from plates made by Joan Miró at Atelier 17 in New York in 1947. Miró had come to the United States for work on a commission for the Plaza Hotel in Cincinnati, Ohio. He had been working at Atelier 17 on and off since the early 1939s and visited Stanley William Hayter in New York in June, 1947.

“One of the artists who exploited the effects of open bite etching most successfully was Joan Miró. Previously Miró had limited his prints to fairly conventional etchings and drypoints”. However, in New York in 1947, “the variety and unorthodoxy of the devices Miró employed…testify not only to the imaginative powers of an individual artist, but also to the uninhibited attitude toward experimentation that prevailed at Atelier 17 during the 1940s. (Joanne Moser’s, Atelier 17 A 50th Anniversary Retrospective Exhibition, Elvehjem Art Center, university of Wisconsin, Madison 1977)

The plate for Mirós Serie I (Dupin 75-82) was printed and published by Maeght in Paris in 1952. However our impressions were pulled when Miró made the plate in New York. They are a superb demonstration of Miró exploring the possibilities of an etched plate: one impression is printed in relief, with the ink rolled onto the surface where with the other impression he has inked and wiped the surface of the plate clean to push the figures forward, haloed by the deep-etched outline. They are a handsome pair and both are annotated, “pour Hayter New York 17/6/1947”. The relief impression is also annotated on back, “Femme Enfants Etoilé,” while the intaglio impression is annotated, “Jeux d’Enfant”.

We are fortunate that this pair remained together in Hayter’s own collection and we could not be more pleased to offer them 70 years on.

Victoria Burge makes prints and drawings that use systems of mapping to generate abstracted cartographies of imagined terrains. We are very pleased to present her newest large-scaled, six-color lithograph with lots of hand work, Vega, 2017. We will show this extraordinary new work at the 2017 IFPDA Print Fair. Please ask to see it along with an earlier lithograph of the night sky and 2 new and related drawings.

Victoria Burge’s prints are in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the British Museum, the Hunterian Museum and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She has been awarded Fellowships and grants in support of her work from the Independence Foundation, the Krasner-Pollock Foundation and will travel to Ireland in 2018 for a residency at the Ballinglen Arts Foundation.

We have a great selection of early and innovative prints selected from Krishna Reddy’s studio. We are happy to send images and information. Please contact us: info@dolanmaxwell.com

“I first met Krishna in the early fifties. He was studying sculpture with Ossip Zakine in Paris. Zadkine sent Krishna to me because he felt that this young Indian artist also possessed remarkable graphic talents that the atmosphere of the Atelier 17 might allow to develop fully. Thus it was the sculptural aspect of printmaking that he commenced to develop: not as many other sculptors the repetition of the sculptural drawing nor the representation of sculptures realized or to be realized, but rather the plate as a sculpture in itself and its amplification by means of print. Thus, whereas a sculptor can erect a framework in space, an object having the relations between internal and external space, in a print made from a sculptured surface it is entirely possible to invert the space of the structure and to exchange the internal with the external space. This characteristic ambiguity, not in the sense of confusion, but rather in the sense of multiple linked expressions he elaborated not only in black and white but in a very curious and original use of the function of color as space. Others have used the simple consequences of color opposition to demonstrate space as cold color against warm color, tone against a complementary. Krishna however employed extremely subtle variants of color carried the hollows of a plate going far beyond simple sculptural relief giving as a result a complex web in which light itself becomes the medium of sculpture”.

We are pleased to offer an important new group of eight etchings by Stanley Whitney (born 1946, Philadelphia, PA). Whitney is a 2016 USA Jeanne & Michael Klein Fellow. His 2015 exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem brought a new level of critical and market notice. This brand new series of large etchings show Whitney continuing his exploration of abstract motifs—the layering and stacking of grid and gesture, line and shape. Whitney was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1996.

Anders Bergstrom’s Brown Bag Test is emblematic of everyday commerce and discrimination. Each series of bags is unique. The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired a set, Brown Bag Test, December 21, 2014, Proof and Counterproof, and it is handsomely installed in the rotating prints gallery #690. From their label, “The brown paper bag is both a quotidian and a designed object. Bergstrom creates miniature replicas with details such as jagged edges, seams, and inked numbers that are imitative of a bar code but which actually corresponds to the artist’s zip code. This work’s title references the discriminatory practice in which an individual’s complexion is judged against the color of a brown paper bag, yet Bergstrom does not privilege one bag over another, instead arranging them on a spectrum from light to dark.”

Anders has explored the everyday paper bag in it’s multiple states of use–replicating the grease-stained and the crumpled. Anders’s printed works are included in the permanent collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Yale’s Beinecke Library, Smith College Museum of Art and the New York Public Library. The Met’s Brown Bag Test, December 21, 2014, is on view thru early January 2017.

We are pleased to share a dramatic new work by this Philadelphia native. Colaizzo’s work focuses on landscapes that blur the line between natural and unnatural. It contextualizes man’s mark on the earth with a broad view of nature. It involves ideas about natural history, cosmos, human progress, mystery, and spirit.

This large (36 x 96″), work was made by using multi-block woodcuts printed by hand to create landscapes that are inspired by the coal industry’s mark in Northeastern Pennsylvania. The scarred earth and mountains of coal are evidence of “human progress,” symbolizing man’s relationship with the earth, trying to seize and conquer it for our own benefit rather than relish in its mysteries. With A Place on Earth, Matt takes inspiration from a contemporary landworks project– a highway rebuilding site that is both immediate and seemingly far removed from a densely populated city.

Alfred Bendiner’s “And So I Give You Our Candidate and the Next President of the United States of America” 1948 captures the energy of convention week then and now in Philadelphia. Bendiner was trained as an architect but is better known as a celebrated cartoonist for the Philadelphia Bulletin known for his wry humor and social commentary. One can only imagine what he’d make of our 2016 presidential race.

This work was made in 1948 when both the Democratic Party Convention and the G.O.P. Convention were both held in Philadelphia. We believe the wreathed candidate is Thomas Dewey, who famously lost to Harry Truman and became one of our most admired presidents.

We have an excellent selection of works by Bendiner (1899-1964). Please ask for more images or, even better, come visit to see them face to face.

American sculptor and print maker Helen Phillips born 1913, Fresno, California. She studied at the School of Fine Art in San Francisco and learned direct carving techniques from Ralph Stackpole, who introduced her to Diego Rivera but Phillips was more excited by Oceanic and Pre-Columbian art than Social Realism. Phillips won Phelan Traveling Fellowship which allowed her to work in Paris in 1936. There, she entered Atelier 17, the intaglio print workshop where she met it’s founder and future husband, Stanley William Hayter. Learning to engrave copper in Paris had an important impact on the development of her sculpture, forcing her to become conscious of negative space. She fled to New York in 1939 and became a pioneer of the New York School, exhibiting with Wilfredo Lam, Roberto Matta, David Hare, Isamu Noguchi and Arshile Gorky.
Phillips’s sculpture and intaglio prints are in the permanent collections of the Albright Knox Gallery, Peggy Guggenheim, Venice, Dallas Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, San Diego Museum of Art. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, MOMA, New York, DeYoung Museum, San Francisco, Princeton University Art Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. She died in New York in 1995.

Sculptor, painter and print maker John Wilson passed away on January 26. Wilson made his life in Boston, graduating from graduating the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston with highest honors in 1945 and received a bachelor’s degree in education from Tufts University in 1947. With a traveling on fellowship from the School of the MFA, Boston, Wilson studied with Ferdinand Leger in Paris. In 1950, a John Hay Whitney Fellowship took him to Mexico where he pursued his interest in mural making. His 1986 bronze bust of Martin Luther King stands in the Capitol Rotunda in Washington, DC. The Boston Globe quotes his wife, Julie: “Essentially, he felt that his main objective as an artist was to deliver a message to people about black dignity, about racial justice, about poor people trying to get a better deal in life.”

We are honored to share 2 important lithographs, Dialogue, 1955 and Urbanites, 1964 by the excellent John Wilson

Raymond Steth, born 1917, Norfolk, Virginia; died 1997, Philadelphia, began working in the graphics division of the WPA/FAP in Philadelphia in 1938. Here he worked with Dox Thrash, inventor of the Carborundum mezzotint. In addition to Thrash’s new technique, Steth produced a fine group of lithographs with Social Realist themes that document his intimate knowledge of city life as well as the rural South. Wrapping Tobacco is a rare example of Steth exploring Depression-era life in Virginia’s Tobacco fields. Steth infuses his prints with a profound emotional that places them amongst the very best works produced for the WPA.
Steth later studied at the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, the Philadelphia College of Art, where he later taught. He co-founded and directed the Philographic School of Art from 1948-1953. His remarkable prints are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Library of Congress, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Smithsonian Institution.